Namae

Namae is a parser for human names. It recognizes personal names of various cultural backgrounds and tries to split them into their component parts (e.g., given and family names, honorifics etc.).

Quickstart

Install the namae gem (or add it to your Gemfile):
```
$ gem install namae
```

Start parsing names! Namae expects you to pass in a string and it returns a list of parsed names:

require 'namae'

names = Namae.parse 'Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto'
#-> [#<Name family="Matsumoto" given="Yukihiro" nick="Matz">]

Use the name objects to access the individual parts:

matz = names[0]

matz.nick
#-> "Matz"

matz.family
#-> "Matsumoto"

matz.initials
#-> "Y.M."

matz.initials :expand => true
#-> "Y. Matsumoto"

matz.initials :dots => false
#-> "YM"

Format and Examples

Namae recognizes names in a wide variety of two basic formats, internally referred to as display-order and sort-order. For example, the following names are written in display-order:

Namae.parse 'Charles Babbage'
#-> [#<Name family="Babbage" given="Charles">]]

Namae.parse 'Mr. Alan M. Turing'
#-> [#<Name family="Turing" given="Alan M." appellation="Mr.">]

Namae.parse 'Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto'
#-> [#<Name family="Matsumoto" given="Yukihiro" nick="Matz">]

Namae.parse 'Augusta Ada King and Lord Byron'
#-> [#<Name family="King" given="Augusta Ada">, #<Name family="Byron" title="Lord">]

Namae.parse 'Sir Isaac Newton'
#-> [#<Name family="Newton" given="Isaac" title="Sir">]

Namae.parse 'Prof. Donald Ervin Knuth'
#-> [#<Name family="Knuth" given="Donald Ervin" title="Prof.">]

Or in sort-order:

Namae.parse 'Turing, Alan M.'
#-> [#<Name family="Turing" given="Alan M.">]

You can also mix sort- and display-order in the same expression:

Namae.parse 'Torvalds, Linus and Alan Cox'
#-> [#<Name family="Torvalds" given="Linus">, #<Name family="Cox" given="Alan">]

Typically, sort-order names are easier to parse, because the syntax is less ambiguous. For example, multiple family names are always possible in sort-order:

Namae.parse 'Carreño Quiñones, María-Jose'
#-> [#<Name family="Carreño Quiñones" given="María-Jose">]

Whilst in display-order, multiple family names are only supported when the name contains a particle or a nickname.

Rationale

Parsing human names is at once too easy and too hard. When working in the confines of a single language or culture it is often a trivial task that does not warrant a dedicated software package; when working across different cultures, languages, or scripts, however, it may quickly become unrealistic to devise a satisfying, one-size-fits-all solution. In languages like Japanese or Chinese, for instance, the issue of word segmentation alone is probably more difficult than name parsing itself.

Having said that, Namae is based on the rules used by BibTeX to format names and can therefore be used to parse names of most languages using latin script with the long-time goal to support as many languages and scripts as possible without the need for sophisticated or large dictionary based language-detection or word segmentation features.

For further reading, see the W3C's primer on Personal Names Around the World.

Development

The Namae source code is hosted on GitHub. You can check out a copy of the latest code using Git:

$ git clone https://github.com/berkmancenter/namae.git

To get started, generate the parser and run all tests:

$ cd namae
$ bundle install
$ rake racc
$ rake features
$ rake spec

If you've found a bug or have a question, please open an issue on the issue tracker. Or, for extra credit, clone the Namae repository, write a failing example, fix the bug and submit a pull request.

Contributors

Sylvester Keil
Dan Collis-Puro

Copyright

Namae is dual licensed under the AGPL and a BSD-style license.